To save the world and beat cancer, of course! It seems like our entire lives have been pushing us in this
inevitable direction, and at an accelerating pace in recent years. While I come from small town farming
stock, my Wall Street career didn’t really afford me much of an opportunity to
develop my chain saw and tractor skills, but I’ve been catching on
quickly. Rick and I, along with
most everyone we know, have always been aware - at least in an academic sense -
of the risks inherent in our collective divergence from “real food” and toward
the processed variety. Painfully
for us all, the increasing prevalence of cancer, and immuno compromised
illnesses strike hard and deep, and most studies now indicate that diet is at
the heart of most all of these diseases. Both of Rick’s parents died of cancer, and our beloved lab
Jake died in the course of a two week illness of stomach cancer. Of course, it seems that weekly we all
learn of another friend with cancer, or arthritis, and we all watch somewhat
helplessly as our children fall victim to asthma, and suffer from ADD, ADHD,
and an alphabetic plethora of possibly treatable but uncurable diseases.

Until Jake’s death in the summer of 2011, we had always
known that human arrogance toward our planet was likely causing our own deaths
from disease, but we had never known the extent to which we were also killing
all life. During the two weeks
between Jake’s diagnosis and his death, we discovered that there is an entire
world of animal oncology, and met with Dr. Jerry Post, the founder of the
Animal Cancer Foundation, and learned that roughly 60% of all dogs born today
will die of cancer. Equally
terrifyingly, there is a school of thought that suggests that animal oncology incidence
rates are simply a precursor to human incidence rates. With Jake’s death, we began to more
aggressively try to understand what was happening to our world, and we came to
realize, through Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, and Michael Pollen’s An Omnivore’s
Dilemma, and Food Inc. that much, if not most, of what we are fed is killing
us. We began trying to locate
“real food” to eat, and realized that even eliminating fast food still leaves
you with largely processed food in restaurants. Worse, eliminating eating out completely still leaves you with
terrible food choices at the local grocery store: Tyson’s chicken, and
Smithfield pork. Eliminating
meat still leaves you with vegetables grown from GMO seed with no nutrients,
and then dyed for color and washed in chlorine. And so Hedgelawn Farm morphed from our private park and into
another step in the national discussion of what is food.

Why we farm is really simple: we want to be able to eat real
food, and we want you to join us.